Help me get my PioneerDVD to play DVDs

[camaro]

My Pioneer 115 tray version turned out to be RPC2. I can't watch 90% of the DVDs. It worked a year or so ago for some movies, but these days it works for nothing. It's useless. I have no idea what those idiots locked it at. I'm pretty sure it's region 1 since it did play some movies. So I have no idea why it won't play other movies. Oh and here is another thing. It will play regular screen movies, but it won't play wide screen versions. So if I rent a movie that is wide screen on one side and TV format on the other, it will play the TV format, but not the widescreen. So I'm guessing it's NOT the region that's the problem. I tried Power DVD3 and WinDVD3.1. I tried messing with DVD Genie. Nothing worked. Any ideas?

[omega31]

All dvd drives made after 2000 are RPC2. There are many drives that have region free hacked firmware to make the drives region free.

I have a Pioneer A05S Slot-feed drive that I flashed with a region free firmware. I can play movies from any region. Using dvd genie, it says RPC1, which is region free and changes are unlimited. There's a web page that has region free hacked firmware for Pioneer drives.

http://www.geocities.com/progressramsoftnet/DVD/firmwares.htm

The following page describes a problem with older Pioneer dvd drives playing movies in Windows XP. Are you running Windows XP?

http://www.pioneeraus.com.au/multimedia/support/faq/faq.htm#DVD-ROM_Drives

Edit:
This is a link to a newer pioneer hacked firmware page:
http://kickme.to/dvd105s

A page with dvd-rom drive hacked firmware:
http://perso.club-internet.fr/farzeno/firmware/

[camaro]

I'm running win2k. Thanks for the links I'll check them out now. So what you're saying is if I buy a new DVD player I'll have to do the same thing to it.